[Exclusive] ekincare Acquires Superclaims to Expand Its Insurance Operations

ekincare has spent more than a decade building a digital healthcare benefits platform for employers, helping companies offer telemedicine, health check-ups, mental health support, pharmacy services, and insurance-linked care to employees. The company now wants to extend that role beyond corporate wellness and into the systems that decide how healthcare is financed and paid for.

The Hyderabad-based healthtech platform has acquired Superclaims for an undisclosed amount to build an AI-powered claims intelligence layer spanning OPD and IPD claims, connecting employers, employees, hospitals, insurers, and third-party administrators (TPAs).

Superclaims works with insurers and TPAs to automate inpatient, or IPD, insurance claims—one of the most document-heavy and operationally complex parts of the healthcare system. ekincare, meanwhile, has built capabilities around outpatient, or OPD, claims, preventive healthcare, and enterprise health benefits. 

The acquisition gives ekincare an entry into insurance technology, while offering Superclaims access to ekincare’s enterprise customer base, healthcare provider network, and distribution infrastructure. With the acquisition, ekincare is also setting its sights beyond India, with plans to build an AI-powered SaaS platform for insurance companies globally.

“While ekincare has already built strong capabilities in OPD claims, IPD claims are much more complicated, and that’s exactly where Superclaims has built real expertise,” Kiran Kalakuntla, Co-founder and CEO of ekincare, tells AIM. “When we looked at the bigger picture, it became clear that what we had built and what Superclaims had developed complemented each other well.”

What the Acquisition Entails

Instead of just acqui-hiring, ekincare has acquired Superclaims’ technology platform as well as team, while Superclaims will continue to operate independently as a legal entity. Its co-founders, Bhavish Ramaswamy and Maneesh Daithala, along with the leadership team, will continue to run the business.

Rather than merging the teams or folding Superclaims into ekincare’s existing operations, the company plans to integrate ekincare’s AI-powered OPD claims engine into Superclaims. The result, it says, will be an independent claims-processing platform capable of handling both outpatient and inpatient claims.

Superclaims is expected to function as a technology layer sitting on top of the existing systems used by insurers and TPAs. The companies are positioning Superclaims as an AI layer that can plug into existing workflows, process documents, assess claims, and flag anomalies without requiring a complete technology overhaul.

“Claims should be a source of confidence, not complexity,” Bhavish Ramaswamy, Co-founder and CEO of Superclaims, noted. “By using AI to automate one of healthcare’s most manual processes, we’ve helped insurers and TPAs make faster and more accurate decisions. Joining ekincare enables us to take that impact further by connecting claims with the broader healthcare ecosystem.”

Overhauling India’s Insurtech

The deal comes as India’s health insurance sector remains constrained by fragmented workflows. India processes more than 3 crore health insurance claims every year, while health insurers paid out more than ₹94,000 crore in claims in FY25, according to the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India. Yet the claims process often remains dependent on manual document checks, phone calls, and separate systems used by hospitals, insurers, and TPAs.

The friction is especially visible in cashless hospitalisation claims. A patient may be medically ready for discharge, but the final approval can be delayed while insurers review hospital records, treatment details, policy conditions, and billing documents. ekincare and Superclaims say the average wait for cashless claim approval is around 90 minutes, and that their AI-assisted system can reduce this to under five minutes.

The larger commercial case is around claims accuracy and leakage control.

Insurance claims involve high volumes of unstructured data, including discharge summaries, prescriptions, diagnostic reports, bills, and treatment notes. Manual review can create inconsistencies and leave room for errors, duplicate claims, inflated billing or claims that do not meet policy conditions. AI-based adjudication platforms are designed to extract information from these documents, compare it against policy rules, and identify potential exceptions before a claim is approved.

For insurers, even marginal improvements can be meaningful. ekincare estimates that an insurer processing ₹500 crore in annual claims could recover close to ₹5 crore with a 1% improvement in leakage control. At a market level, the companies see this as an opportunity to turn claims from a back-office operational function into a source of intelligence for fraud detection, risk assessment, and underwriting.

“Healthcare has traditionally evolved in silos,” Kalakuntla explains. “Employers manage benefits; providers deliver care, while insurers and TPAs process claims independently. We believe the future of healthcare lies in connecting these ecosystems through intelligence.”

The Healthtech Shift

The acquisition also reflects a wider shift in Indian healthtech. Much of the sector’s early growth was built around consumer-facing services such as doctor consultations, medicine delivery, and diagnostic bookings. More recently, companies have been looking at enterprise healthcare, hospital operations, insurance distribution, and healthcare payments—areas where technology can address deeper operational inefficiencies.

Claims processing sits at the intersection of all these systems. A platform that can work across these participants can have greater strategic value than a standalone benefits or wellness product.

ekincare currently serves more than 2 million employees across over 1,000 organisations and has a provider network of more than 90,000 healthcare providers across 500-plus cities. The acquisition creates an opportunity for the company to increase wallet share among its enterprise customers, while also cross-selling to insurers and TPAs that use Superclaims.

For Superclaims, the deal gives the company a broader data and distribution environment to develop its AI models. As claims platforms process more structured and unstructured healthcare information, they can potentially improve their ability to identify anomalies, support more consistent decision-making, and generate insights for underwriting.

Maneesh Daithala, Co-founder and CTO of Superclaims, says the company’s objective has always been broader than automating paperwork. “We believe AI can do far more than automate paperwork; it can help insurers make faster, more consistent, and explainable decisions,” he adds.

Explainability could become increasingly important as insurers adopt AI in high-stakes claims decisions. While automation can improve turnaround times, insurers will need systems that can show why a claim was flagged, approved, or sent for further review. That is particularly relevant in health insurance, where a delay or rejection can directly affect patients and hospitals.

ekincare says AI has been part of its operating model, particularly in using data to personalise healthcare benefits and connect different parts of the healthcare ecosystem. 

“With Superclaims, we are strengthening our AI capabilities in claims adjudication and fraud detection,” Kalakuntla says.

The longer-term ambition is to take the combined platform beyond India, tapping into Superclaims’ potential as an AI-powered SaaS platform to serve insurance companies globally, particularly in markets where claims operations remain labour-intensive and reliant on fragmented documentation.